Online therapy for trauma, including EMDR

Where therapy helps

Trauma can sit quietly for years and still shape how you live

Trauma doesn’t always look the way people expect. Sometimes it’s the obvious: an accident, a frightening medical event, a moment that changed what felt safe. Sometimes it’s more subtle: a hospital admission that didn’t go well, a misdiagnosis that took years to put right, a series of appointments where you weren’t believed. Single events and accumulated weight can both leave the same kind of mark.

For some people it shows up as flashbacks, intrusive thoughts, broken sleep, or a startle response that won’t settle. For others it’s more subtle: avoidance, things you stopped doing, places you can’t go back to, conversations you don’t have. And sometimes there isn’t a clear label at all, only a sense that the world feels different now and you can’t quite put it into words.

Therapy can’t undo what happened, and it doesn’t replace the medical care you have in place. What it can do is change what the memory does to you in the present, so the experience gets properly processed and the memory stays without the same grip on your day.

My approach

How I work with trauma

EMDR (Eye Movement Desensitisation and Reprocessing) is the main approach I use for trauma. It’s a structured therapy that helps the brain process memories that still feel as charged and present as when they happened. Sessions involve recalling the difficult experience while engaging in a specific kind of bilateral stimulation, which over time reduces how vivid and intrusive the memory is. EMDR is recommended by NICE for PTSD following single-event trauma, and is also used for more complex and long-standing presentations where it’s clinically appropriate.

ACT (Acceptance and Commitment Therapy) sits alongside EMDR for the work outside the memory itself: the avoidance, the constriction, the way trauma can shrink your life. ACT helps you take steps back into what matters, often in parallel with the memory work.

CBT (Cognitive Behavioural Therapy) shapes how I think about evidence-based practice. My BABCP accreditation grounds the wider approach in proven traditions, even as I draw on what’s most helpful for the person in front of me.

The blend depends on what you’re carrying. Some people come for a focused course of EMDR on a specific memory. Others need the wider work alongside, especially when trauma has been part of life for a long time. The work fits you.

Conditions

Types of trauma I work with

If your experience isn’t listed, that doesn’t mean it isn’t a fit. The free consultation is the right place to check.

In sessions

What we’ll actually work on

Trauma therapy isn’t generic. The structure of the work depends on what you’re bringing. EMDR has its own protocol that we follow for the memory processing itself, and the wider work usually covers some combination of these:

• Stabilisation and resourcing. Before processing difficult memories, we make sure you have the skills to manage the work safely: grounding techniques, ways to slow down a session, ways to come back to the present. This is the foundation that the rest of the EMDR work rests on.
• The EMDR work itself. Reprocessing the memories that need it, at a pace that’s right for you. We don’t have to start with the hardest one.
• The patterns the trauma has set up. Avoidance, hypervigilance, the things you’ve stopped doing or stopped letting yourself feel. The memory work and the life-rebuilding work tend to move in parallel.
• Sleep, mood, and the body. Trauma lives in the nervous system as much as in memory. We work the loop: better sleep helps processing, processing helps sleep.
• Working with healthcare again, where that applies. For people whose trauma is rooted in medical experiences, going to appointments, scans, or procedures can be its own challenge. We can work specifically on this.

Read more

Articles I’ve written about medical trauma

• Understanding medical trauma: coping with PTSD

  How medical trauma settles into the nervous system, and what an ACT and EMDR-based approach to medical settings can look like.

• Medical gaslighting is real: how therapy can help

  The cumulative trauma of being dismissed in healthcare, and how therapy helps rebuild self-trust without making future appointments harder.

See all articles →